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PHILADELPHIA — An aide who spent hours on her cell phane the day she left a severely autistic client to die in a hot van was sent to prison Monday for two to five years.

Stacey Strauss, 41, pleaded no contest Monday to involuntary manslaughter in the death last summer of 20-year-old Bryan Nevins, of Oceanside, N.Y.

Strauss, of Philadelphia, had been busy talking and texting with her boyfriend and left Nevins in a locked van after an outing on the 97-degree day, prosecutors say.

She spent about three hours of her eight-hour shift on the phone, despite her employer's ban on personal cell phone use and an order to maintain arm's-reach contact with her two charges that day, prosecutors say.

Philip Seymour Hoffman withdrew a total of $1,200 from an ATM at a supermarket near his New York City apartment the night before he was found lifeless in his bathroom with a syringe still in his left arm, sources told NBC News.

"You're entrusted with the life of someone else's child. You have to take that seriously, and clearly she wasn't," Bucks County District Attorney David Heckler told The Associated Press. "You have to have the patience of a saint to do these jobs, but she took it on."

Strauss had been on the job for nine years, earning about $11.50 an hour, but had been disciplined several times for her cell phone use.

Her lawyer acknowledged that the phone calls affected her job performance, but blamed the July 24 death on a "system-wide failure" at Woods Services, the residential facility in Langhorne where Nevins and a triplet brother had lived for five years.

Supervisors failed to clearly detail the transportation plan, including responsibility for picking up and dropping off clients, or to make rounds to see everyone made it back, defense lawyer Robert Lynch said.

"Obviously the blame starts with Stacey, but it shouldn't end there," Lynch said.

He hoped Strauss would be sentenced to less than a year.

'Broken-heartedness'
Strauss and a second counselor had been assigned to take four clients to Sesame Place, a nearby water park, on a day the temperature would reach 97 degrees. The group returned early after Nevins acted up, trying to bite and scratch himself and others.